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Victoria Finlay

CAN we dissect desire? Can we carve into slices the components of pleasure, and thereby understand its principles?  For most people who are not psychotic the answer is usually 'no': pleasure pulled apart is no longer pleasing.

 But in this strange short novel the hero is a Renaissance Italian anatomist who believed he had discovered the clitoris.

 Like many before him and many since, Mateo Renaldo Colombo - based on a historical character - is the surgeon of sexuality, the explorer of the female flesh.

 The difference is that he becomes famous for it, and that in those bad old days, he also might have died for it.

 The Renaissance was an age of discovery: a true renaissance man was always finding and doing something. And according to the conceit of this book, a true renaissance woman was one of the objects of his finding and doing.

 But amid all that rebirth of curiosity and learning there was a lot of death: the cardinals and professors protected their positions jealously, and burning one's enemies as sorcerers was astonishingly popular. And what a heresy it was to suggest that women might be made to enjoy sex.

 In this story, having written a paper about his discovery, Mateo Colombo is taken from his rooms and booked in for a trial at the University. Believing he is about to be burned at the stake, he writes to the Abbess Ines de Torremolinos admitting how years before he had saved her from dying of an undiagnosed illness by liberating her frustrated sexuality.

 That had been his first discovery of the power of the 'Amor Veneris', and even of its existence.

 He had gone on to test the theory on hundreds of women, with the idea of eventually seducing the woman he was most obsessed by: Mona Sofia, the most expensive whore in Venice. But before that he had to defend himself in court, with a 19-point argument in favour of female masturbation.

 Andahazi emphasises - overemphasises - how the parallels between his lesser known hero and Christopher Columbus go beyond their shared name.

 Colombo 'had no more scruples or pity than Christopher. The shaft of his banner [the double entendres in this book are always deliberate] would not be sunk into the warm sands of the tropics but into the core of the newly discovered land which he claimed for himself: the female body.'  Andahazi's 16th-century Italian world is inhabited by wicked professors, child prostitutes and 'respectable necrophiles'.

 He is excessively careful that we know his story is a metaphor, and not simply the secret 'that between their legs [women] carried the keys to Heaven and Hell'.

 This novel is about hypocrisy, women's bid for equality, the sometimes unwanted intimacy of science. But it is also about sex.

 Which is why this book has been controversial.

 When El Anatomista was first published in Argentina, it won the Fortabat, the country's premier prize for contemporary literature.

 However, when sponsor Amalia Lacroze de Fortabat read it after the prize-giving ceremony she was horrified and called Andahazi a 'communist porn artist'.

 What a doubly generous act of literary sponsorship for a book about hypocrisy, censorship and female sexual hang-ups to get such a response.

 It is probably a bit obscene, but that is not necessarily bad.

  This is very much a male heterosexual fantasy, Peter Greenaway-style: plenty of cold slabs draped with women pretending to be dead yet ready for oral sex.

 A female writer would have fantasised about the discovery of the Amor Veneris in other terms, or perhaps she would not have talked about its 'discovery' at all.

 This is a fun book, a naughty book, a literate book, but it is in many ways a little book: a triumph of cover over content.

The Anatomist by Federico Andahazi translated by Alberto Manguel Doubleday, $230 



In hot water over an erotic find